Build It Green

On Saturday September 20, the City of Portland's Office of Sustainable Development sponsored a the Build It Green home tour. My house, at 5135 NE 42nd Street, along with 18 others were included as examples of sustainable development. I estimate that well over 500 people came through my home on the tour. Portland is an amazing place. It's filled with creative, forward thinking people that spend their time being involved in bettering our world. I'd like to thank several people for their help.

Bill Fritz of Intelligent Design for providing all the home furnishings that made our house the most stylish stop on the tour.

Fredrick Zal of Zal Architecture helped me greet our visitors and explain the potential of our vision of creative reuse.

Valerie Garrett from the City of Portland who organized the Build It Green tour.

I hope that those of you that visited my home were inspired that even off beat projects like mine can be built in a city that prides itself on its commitment to the future. I'm proud of my fellow citizens for coming by to see what we accomplished. And I look forward to hearing from those of you that want to start projects of your own like this. Whether you just need a little advise or you need someone with the skills and experience to build for you I'll be available to help.


I'm proud to call Portland home.

Chris Radcliffe
thechrisradcliffe@gmail.com

Let's Talk About Cost

I've worked on all different types of homes. Historic remodels to new construction. And the thing that always struck me is just how is a kid, starting out, going to be able to afford a home?

Owning a home is a lot more than just paying for a house. It anchors you to your community in a way that until I owned a home I'd never considered. Just how attached can you be to a place if your paying rent. If you don't like your neighbors you can just move. If the street you live on is getting trashed you move. If you own a home you stand and fight. You do things like look out for the neighbors kids and pick up stuff that blew into your yard. Because you know your going to be there a while. The first container guest house that I built cost me $3200.00. It was a single twenty foot standard container (160 square feet). I salvaged almost everything from from places like the Rebuilding center in Portland. I did all the work as well but in the end I had a well insulated little house with a hot shower and toilet.

My point is that even a kid fresh out of school can save up that kind of money. Sure, that's not a lot of room but this kind of construction is modular. If you want more room you can expand as you need it. And there's always little bits of land around that you can put something like this on. I wanted to be able to offer a way to home ownership to someone that couldn't front the usual paperwork to a bank. It's one way to improve the world, a little bit at a time.

It's also got the benefit of creative reuse. 85% of the mass of this house is recycled. I made sure that everything I could from the windows and doors to the boxes themselves had a previous life, it makes ethical and economic sense. In the end my costs on the 640 square foot house in Portland came to about $51.00 a square foot. That includes all the permits and professional services, as well. Simple modern remodels cost at least twice that. Labor costs are going to make that price higher if you can't do any of the work but if your into a little sweat equity those costs can be controlled too.

A couple of other points;

If you keep it painted steel doesn't go anywhere. These homes will be standing long after every thing around it has rotted to the ground. The average modern house has to be almost completely rebuilt every forty years.

They don't have to look like cargo containers when your done working on them. You can sheet these things in any material you chose and blend them into any neighborhood. Even someplace as historic as New Orleans.

This photo was of my first container house at 1140 Carondelet St. New Orleans, Louisiana.

Design Considerations

At its most basic the requirements of any habitable structure is that it's got to be warm, safe and dry. If your going to build with multiple cargo containers there are several factors that you have to take into consideration to fulfill these requirements.

Cargo containers are made to stack, we all know that, but they have to stack on the corners. Any design that stacks containers any other way was probably done by someone that has never built with containers. The whole point of using containers is that they are an inexpensive way of providing structure. If you have to buy a lot of very expensive steel to support a design that does not stack on corners than what is the point of using containers in the first place. I know that this places limits on the designs that you can create but stacking on corners is the basis of safe design.

Cargo containers are made to shed water while they are in motion. When they are standing static on foundations they will not drain. The roof of a container is typically a flat piece of sheet metal with corrugation stamped into it to make it rigid. The weight of the material it is constructed out of will cause it to dip down toward the center in places. Water will pool there and rise until it reaches the seam where two containers come together. Even if this seam is welded it will never be waterproof and that will cause you trouble. So if your design features more than one container you have to consider a roof system of some sort.

Condensation on the inside surface of a container must be dealt with. Water vapor condenses on any surface that has a temperature differential between the exterior and interior of more than a few degrees. You can deal with this by applying different types of insulation systems to accommodate the climate your building in. Get good advise here. After you've sheeted and found that water is running down the interior wall and puddling on the floor its too late. The good news here is that insulation as a percentage of building cost is cheap. And because of the low air infiltration that building with steel boxes gives you the cost of heating the structure will be cheap. How cheap? I used one electric cadet wall heater to keep a 640 square foot home toasty all winter here in Portland, and its quiet too.

Remember; warm, safe and dry.

Foundations

Your containers are going to sit on footings. Footings are the part of a foundation that is dug from the ground and filled with rebar, inbed points and concrete. The footings need only be placed at each corner of each container. The acceptable size of a corner footing is 24"x24" and 16" deep. Where two containers are joined the footing underneath that point should be 36"x36" and 16" deep. At any point that the structure must be supported with an internal column you must support the point load with another 24" square footing.

This use of footings as opposed to perimeter wall or slab foundations is one of the major cost savings gained by using containers. I hired an architect to design my footings because city inspectors and plan reviewers like to look at blueprint drawings with an architect's stamp. Otherwise I would have foregone the cost (about $800.00) and done my own drawings on Corel Draw. When your working on a project that doesn't conform to prescriptive building methods its best to hire this kind of work done for you, if you show up at the building department with stamped plans they don't look at you like your some wacko. Trust me its better to buy your credibility on the cheap this way than to climb over the hurdles that a plan reviewer can demand.

A word here on terms:

#4 rebar (the kind you want to use in these footings) is that stuff that looks about 1/2" thick. Your going to want to form up two squares per footing about 8" above one another and at least 3" clear of the soil.

Inbed points; 3/4" Threaded stainless steel rod with a 1/2" thick 4"x4" steel plate attached at the bottom with a nut. The rod will stick out of the finished concrete and allows you to bolt another steel plate the same size onto the top of the footing. When the containers are placed on the footing this will give you a place to weld the container to the footing. Where two containers come together use two rods and make the plate 4"x8".
(This next part is comes to you as a piece of hard earned wisdom.) This weld is what makes the structure permanent as opposed to a temporary structure. This is important when an appraiser gives you the fish eye and says it just a mobile home and not a house. You will be able to point at the weld and the fact that the electrical meter is mounted on the container and not on a separate pole and say with confidence that its a permanent structure. Conversely if the city inspector is giving you grief about your project (because you didn't pull permits) than you can not weld down to the inbed point and claim its a temporary structure (like a mobile home) and you don't need a new house permit. (Always get the footing permit and have it inspected before you set the containers. This way you can choose which way to go when your deeper in the process.)

Concrete: You might not realize that you can now buy concrete mixed on site in just the amount you need buy calling a short load service. They have a special truck that carries the raw mix materials and will feed it down a shoot into your forms. This is a lot less work and expense than renting a concrete pumper truck and having to deal with a redi-mix truck. The redi-mix trucks usually won't cross your property line for fear of getting stuck and they want you to buy minimums that are going to be more than you need. A short load truck will pull right up to a dry site and save you these problems.

I trust that if your getting into a project like this that you can accurately read a measuring tape and know what a framing square is. In addition to these a good quality laser level will keep you out of trouble. If you need to build forms to make your foundations level at both ends build them four times as strong as you think they need to be, concrete is heavy and you don't want to clean up a mess if the form breaks while your buddy's stand there laughing there asses off, seriously.

This has not actually happened to me but its been close.

(Question)

Hey,
I saw you posts on Inhabit and will most definitely attend this years Build It Green tour.
I live in PDX land and was wondering a few things.
What sort of, if any, setbacks did you face to build this home in the city limits?
Did you build off site or on-site? (ie. containers electrical/plumbing/etc.)
I've been excited to see someone local explore this for a long time.

Doug

(Answer)

Its considered non standard building practice (not wood framed) so you have to conform to the standards of steel building construction. In practice this means that you have to have an engineer calculate the reinforcements that must be added whenever you pierce the walls (doors, windows and interior wall removal). The reinforcment welds must be done by a certified welder and inspected by an independent testing agency. I had the panels that I wanted removed cut and welded before I moved the containers on site. In order to meet energy code the interior was framed on site and insulated, utilities were added the normal way.


CDR

PS. Thats my dad in the photo, I still use some of his tools.

Building With Cargo Containers (introduction)

This blog has been created to answer questions about using conex shipping containers as habitable space. I'll be covering all the issues that came up when I built the structure located at 5135 NE 42nd Street Portland, Oregon. The City of Portland maintains a website called Portlandmaps.com, you can use this website and the above address to see which permits were pulled. Rather than sit and write a complete book about this project I will answer questions posed in the comments part of this blog, or you can email me at thechrisradcliffe@gmail.com and I will post them to this blog.

I think a little personal information is in order so that you can judge the level of skills necessary to pull off a project like this. Most of my professional experience in the building trades came from 15 years in the electrical sign industry. I've been involved in all phases of the design and fabrication to the installation and service of large electrical neon signs in San Francisco. This experience gave me an appreciation of most of the basic skills required in the building trades. In addition to the practical experience of sign work I also worked as an account executive for various sign companies. In this capacity I was able to develop the skills that help estimate costs and manage projects to completion. I was also responsible for pulling permits and seeing the projects though the necessary design review processes that municipalities use to make sure that that a project is both safe and fits into the community.

I left San Francisco in 2000 and moved to New Orleans. I bought and remodeled a 1867 coffee warehouse into my home and commercial rental. In the next five years I went on to work on various projects from a 1870s fire house to the major reconstuction of an 1820s antebullum mansion in the Lower Garden District. I'm very proud of the fact that nothing I worked on in New Orleans suffered any damage by Katrina or any of the hurricanes that plauge the gulf coast. In each of these projects one of my first purchases was a shipping container. They provide me with secure storage for the tools and materials used in constuction. As the last detail of each job I finished out the shipping container as a guest house on the property. I'd sheet the exterior of the container to appear consistant with the main structure.

When I sold my property in New Orleans in 2006 I was given the full square foot value of the container as I got for the house. This caused me to consider constucting a full home from multipule containers. Eventually I settled in Portland, Oregon. I bought the old Hare Khrisna temple on NE 42nd Street. It had a garage that was racked and about to fall over so it was perfect for the project we are going to discuss in this blog.

I'd like to thank you for your interst in my project and I wish you the best of luck building your dreams. I'd be happy to do anything I can do to help you with the construction of your own container house.


Chris Radcliffe, September 2008